Elegant & messy, revelatory & unendingly mysterious:
Inside the new issue of Portable Gray.
Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847–1919), Into the Night, Oil on canvas, 25⅛ x 30⅛ inches, Courtesy of Questroyal Fine Art.
by Ellen Wiese
The psychoanalytic technique of dreamwork, says Gray Center Director and executive editor of Portable Gray Seth Brodsky, “is a kind of work that’s much weirder and more randomized and less censored than what goes into a lot of art-making. But nonetheless, there’s a will to create, and a will to assemble, and to cipher and to displace, or to condense, to create new metaphors.” The artists and scholars working at the Richard & Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry are trying to create new metaphors—metaphors that illuminate or expand traditional understandings of art and scholarship, that provide insight into hidden subjects of the mind and psyche, that open up the unconscious processes of their disciplines and practices to the light.
Seth Brodsky, Associate Professor of Music and the Humanities, is also the Director of the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.
The Gray Center, originally the vision of Richard and Mary Gray, who endowed the Center and gave it its name, was designed from the ground up to be a forum for collaboration. In close dialogue with its inaugural director David Levin, the Center is built around its signature Fellowship initiative, in which two individuals, one from within the University of Chicago and one from outside, work together at the intersection of scholarship and artistic practice. “The idea is that there’s a gap between the two different kinds of professional identity, and two different ways of approaching knowledge,” says Brodsky, who has been the Director of the Gray Center since 2019. Brodsky emphasizes the importance of approaching knowledge, rather than producing it the goal of the Center has never been an end product of artwork or articles, but rather a working, growing partnership founded around “a common problem, impasse or deadlock in fellows’ own practice and in their own way of dealing with the world.” The ideal, Brodsky adds, is to “produce something new out of that common lack.”
Although a tangible product is not the primary goal of the Center’s Fellowships, they have produced some remarkable results. “Sometimes the most avant garde thing people can do is make an opera, the whole thing, soup to nuts, and get it put on,” says Brodsky. “All this talk at the Gray Center of process over product also means allowing the process sometimes to totally deliver.” Over the last 12 years, fellowships at the Center have led to an exhibition of Karega Kofi Moyo’s image archive at the Logan Center for the Arts; an expansion of artist Pope.L’s Whispering Campaign at documenta 14; and the creation of the Media Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center at UChicago, for which Humanities professor Patrick Jagoda’s fellowship experiments provided the DNA. Future projects promise to be only more ambitious. Unlike other fellowships or sponsorships of artists and scholars, the Gray Center doesn’t lead with expectations, but rather asks participants what they’ve always wanted to do, what aspect of their practice is the most frustrating and intriguing, and what they’re going to do about it. Says Brodsky, “What we see is that this design is extremely useful and indeed basically revelatory to our fellows. People will regularly say to us, ‘Nobody’s ever asked me what I wanted before.’” In selecting the Center Fellows, Brodsky and his colleagues work less with an acceptance-rejection model—rather, they work closely with applicants on the ideas they bring to the table, fine-tuning the format and iteration into something the Fellows want to develop through their time with the Center.
Zachary Cahill serves as Director of Programs and Fellowship for the Gray Center and is the Founding Editor-in-Chief, Portable Gray
This process, says Editor-in-Chief of Portable Gray and Director of Programs and Fellowships Zachary Cahill, brings out work that isn’t necessarily immediately recognizable as either formal scholarship or what some might call high art. “To put it colloquially, we’re a weird center that’s able to actually do weird stuff,” he says. “We have a process of working that is pretty elegant in its design and thinking, but it’s messy insomuch as there are always new minds coming to us and they have a whole other take on it. It’s fun to watch that meeting of the minds, and art and scholarship collide and get confused, and at their best create new forms.”
Under this model of collaboration, expansion into uncertainty is key. This is part of the reason the Center highlights process over product—to empower Fellows to do more than just complement each other’s work or even build a greater whole from their divergent parts. Instead, artists and scholars are encouraged to find and explore the hidden engines beneath the work they’re already doing, and the deep reasons behind the stumbling blocks they’ve encountered. “I think a lot of what goes by the name collaboration is actually a series of very carefully placed protections against collaborating,” says Brodsky. “One could call them defense mechanisms. You know, discipline, disciplinarity, metier, professionalization, professionalism—these things are all extremely important, and at the same time, they can be defenses against coming into contact with something that’s other, and that’s different.”
In the way it excavates commonly held yet often buried problems of both artistic and scholarly pursuits, the Gray Center is concerned with finding ways for the unconscious to speak. This might be the unconscious of the University and its connection to art-making, or the unspoken problems in disciplines of art and science that are brought into the light to be examined. “There’s a primordial aspect to it that’s super fun to watch over and over again,” says Cahill. “Something new. It never ceases to amaze me.”
A Portable Conversation
“The fact is that what one does with knowledge that has not yet been discovered, is to not see it,” says Brodsky. “There’s a certain kind of structural cunning that one needs to institute to be in the presence of something new, and to try to do something with it.” Fellows at the Gray Center use academic and artistic practices to approach problems of knowledge and bring out what is unseen, unspoken, unheard—through methods that don’t rely on forcing it to the surface, but rather letting conversations evolve in their own time. The Center is a place that allows the unconscious to come out into the open through the same kind of structure as analysis—as Brodsky describes, “You have two people who are playing auditors, alternating the role of auditor for each other, and saying to the other one, ‘Speak.’”
Max Guy, Still from Lucifer Reads, “Voice as Phallus, from Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor by Gershwin Legman,” 2018, single-channel video, 19:29 minutes . Courtesy of the artist.
Portable Gray, the journal produced by the Gray Center since 2018, provides a crystallization of that conversation. Released twice a year in fall and spring, Portable Gray blasts apart the lines between art and scholarship, serving as a frame, vessel, instigator, and investigator for art about scholarship, scholarship about art, and, most importantly, what falls between and fully outside that distinction. The latest issue is what Brodsky describes as “a brain-breakingly various collection, full of so many different voices, timbres, turns of phrase, approaches to communication and invocations.” It includes poems, interviews, and essays, but also sketch-diagrams, text exchanges, and pieces that defy categorization entirely. Yet even to list the contents by type does Portable Gray a disservice—it’s a journal that can only be explained by reading.
Unlike a traditional academic journal, there isn’t a strict or preordained scholarly focus. “We assemble it, not in a headless way, but in a way where we ourselves feel provoked by the variety,” says Brodsky. “In some ways it’s the antimatter of an academic journal. Each issue tests the intuitive academic sense of a journal’s integrity in one way or another.” And this antimatter is also meant to evoke a playfulness even when dealing with difficult topics. “There’s something invigorating, even when we’re covering material that might not be super easy to talk about—there’s an element of delight,” says Cahill. “When things are working in the journal and at the Center, there’s a sense of, ‘This feels like something new,’ even when it’s hard—it’s refreshing.”
John Neff, excerpt from A Sketch for A Movie, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
Cahill and Brodsky are quick to point out that, just as Gray Center Fellowships rely on the juxtaposition and intersection of inquiry driven by more than one mind, the production of Portable Gray is a team sport. As Cahill frames it, “We are nothing without our rock/Managing Editor Naomi Blumberg, our designer David Khan Giordano who makes the journal such a special object every issue, the expansive mind of Sabrina Craig our Assistant Director, Public Programs and Archives at the Gray, and the brilliant Mike Schuh our Senior Editor and Assistant Director of Fellowships and Operations, who really must be credited for pushing for an alternative spatial arrangement at the launch [for the 9th edition]...It is a true team effort with everyone making the magic happen at the Gray Center.”
This issue in particular came out of thinking about the Gray Center’s and psychoanalysis’ common interest: “unconscious knowledge, and figuring out how to take responsibility for that knowledge, figuring out how to let it speak without smoking it out or forcing it out or being aggressive,” says Brodsky. “That’s the thing about unconscious knowledge, you can’t get it out by forcing it.” And so Portable Gray’s ninth issue developed into Arts of Psychoanalysis, a moniker that Cahill and Brodsky came up with together. “I forget which one of us came up with it first,” says Brodsky with a laugh, “Honestly, it’s very typical for me and Zach [Cahill] that the idea, its authorship, isn’t clear.” This issue incorporates various forms of art that use psychoanalytic methods, with actual psychoanalysis as only one of many. “It’s not standing above them all as a big umbrella. It’s not authorizing them all as a patriarchal injunction,” says Brodsky. “It’s just another one of the ways to coax the unconscious into speaking.”
Melissa Friedling, Digital collage, 2022. Courtesy of the artists.
A Psychoanalytic Launch
Like everything else the Gray Center does, the launch of the ninth issue of Portable Gray is built from minds coming together. Featuring a conversation with contributors Adam Blum, Anna Kornbluh, John Neff, and Hannah Zeavin and moderated by Seth Brodsky, the event is presented through the Center’s Sidebar series in a format Cahill helped invent. Faced with the ubiquity of the university panel and the authority it implies, Cahill wanted “to find a way to warp it or curve it, throw it a little bit off balance.” In past installments in the monthly conversation series, participants have presented film screenings, performance/lectures, outdoor conversations, and symposia. As to this launch’s take on presenting Arts of Psychoanalysis to the world? Cahill and Brodsky don’t want to spoil the surprise, but, says Brodsky, participants are encouraged to bring yoga mats and “it will involve an unusual disposition of bodies in space.”
In the expansive collaboration, inventive scholarship, and artistic voyaging of the Gray Center, Brodsky and Cahill are ultimately making a case for the importance of play. Universities have the potential to be places for exploration and delight—not despite the often-serious subject matter of their investigations, but because of them. “Much of the expertise we’re generating now at universities is rightfully shining a spotlight on the ways in which the world is falling drastically off course,” Brodsky says. “And in order to properly meet the struggles of the future, it also helps to be happy and well-fed, in various ways, so we’re a modest little motor at the University for trying to think that way.”
The launch, too, is a place for this way of thinking, presenting a journal full of difficulty and curiosity, words and images that will leave you considering your own new metaphors. As Eve L. Ewing says in her piece for the issue, Thursday Morning, Newbury Street: “I think that maybe if we can guard ourselves and each other, if we can keep from losing our minds alone in quiet rooms and can at least lose them side by side, we may live through the year.”
The launch of Portable Gray’s newest issue will take place tonight February 23, 2023 at the Gray Center. Read more about the launch here, and purchase a physical copy of Issue 9 or access the online format here.